PARIS, June 23 — Monkeypox may soon have a new name after scientists called for a change to dispel stereotypes of Africa being seen as a crucible of disease.
Last year the WHO officially named Covid-19 variants after Greek letters to avoid stigmatising the places where they were first detected. Out of the more than 2,100 monkeypox cases recorded globally this year, 84 per cent were in Europe, 12 per cent in the Americas and just three per cent in Africa, according to the WHO’s latest update last week.Oyewale Tomori, a virologist at Redeemer’s University in Nigeria, said he supported changing the name of monkeypox’s clades.“If I were a monkey, I would protest because it’s not really a monkey disease.
But the current outbreak “is unusual in that it is purely spreading through human to human transmission,” said Olivier Restif, an epidemiologist at the University of Cambridge. “We’ve seen it most strikingly with HIV in the 1980s, with Ebola during the 2013 outbreak and again with Covid-19 and the reactions to the so-called ‘South African variants’,” he told AFP.
Restif pointed out that the “old stock photographs of African patients” used by Western media usually depict severe symptoms.
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